bit of excel help needed..

skanky

skanky

skanky

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21 Jul 2005
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any advice will be greatly appreciated, i'm looking for a dummies guide on how to do the following:

i have a list of name and phone numbers, i want to be able to select via drop down box in A1 the name of a person and then in A2, it will show the corresponding phone number that has been pre-defined.

i've googled about a bit and vlookup looks like it could be what i need, but bit lost on the how-to!
 
i'm not entirely sure if thats the case, i saw a example of what i'm after at work, but the person who made it is long gone.

it was a purchase order form which let you put a cost center in and by selecting a cost center from the predefined list, it added the name of the department to a cell below it.

it seemed to get the list of cost centers from table in a separate worksheet (from the first column) and the cell which has the name of the department had a VLOOKUP code in it which got the information from the 2nd column on same table.

i need that functionality in a new workbook so copy/pasting is out of the question.

i'm not all that good with excel btw! :)
 
yeah thats sounds like the thing i'm after.

how would i go about creating it so that "sheet1, a1" was the drop-down box (where the info from "sheet2, a1-36" would go) so i could then select the info for the above vlookup to display the corresponding data?
 
example2.xls is exactly the sort of thing i'm after!

if i wanted to add an extra name/number to that list it seems i have to right click on the drop down box then format control and change the input ranges.

is there a way to do it so that excel will automatically read and add to the drop down box anything put in the name/number columns on sheet2 unless its blank?
 
there wouldnt be any reason why they would pick an empty cell, but if they dont have the choice to pick an empty cell, thats one less way they can screw it up! :)

i'd like to make it as idiot proof as i can.

edit: going back to example2.xls, is there any way of having A1 (drop down box) have some text like "select name here" which gets overwritten when the user selects a name, but also so that the "select name" text isnt selectable as an option after the drop down box is selected?
 
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